BASEBALL; The Cardinals Start With a Bang

By PAT BORZI

Published: October 5, 2005

The carpool partners stood 20 feet from each other in the Cardinals' clubhouse, cracking jokes, relishing the moment. Reggie Sanders, in a glittering vintage Black Sabbath concert T-shirt, promised to play some Mariah Carey -- Larry Walker's favorite -- for the ride home, to celebrate the Cardinals' 8-5 victory over San Diego on Tuesday in Game 1 of their National League division series.

And Walker, wearing a Jimmy Page shirt, announced he would gladly keep riding shotgun in Sanders's Hummer H1 as long as the Cardinals continued to win.

''He's driven the last four days because we've been winning,'' said Walker, referring to the Cardinals' three-game sweep of Cincinnati to finish the regular season. ''I'll drive tomorrow because it's a workout day. I'll give him a break.''

Sanders, who missed almost two months of the season with a fractured right fibula before returning in mid-September, gave the Cardinals the biggest break of all. Sanders's grand slam and six runs batted in, the latter figure a team postseason record, almost single-handedly chased San Diego starter Jake Peavy, who turned out to be pitching with a fractured rib on his right side.

And that left the N.L. West champion Padres in a precarious position.

The Cardinals, who led the majors with 100 victories while posting the lowest earned run average (3.49) in the major leagues, came into this best-of-five series as the prohibitive favorite. San Diego, which barely finished above .500, hoped to steal Game 1 behind Peavy, the N.L. strikeout leader, who fanned 10 in an eight-inning no-decision against the Cardinals on July 27.

But Peavy was not nearly as effective Tuesday, allowing two homers among eight runs on eight hits in four and a third innings. Only 3 times in 30 starts had Peavy given up as many as five earned runs; he allowed seven against the Mets on July 21 in a 12-0 loss at Shea Stadium.

''I was shocked we got that many off Peavy,'' Walker said. ''You're happy to get two or three off a guy like him.''

Peavy sustained bruised ribs last Wednesday night in the postgame pile celebrating the Padres' division title. He felt discomfort in his subsequent bullpen session, but thought he could pitch through it.

The pain worsened in the third inning Tuesday, when Peavy caught his spikes, landed awkwardly and threw a run-scoring wild pitch. He left after Sanders's grand slam, and a magnetic resonance imaging test at a nearby hospital revealed the fracture. ''I'm not going to blame the pitch on the rib,'' Peavy said. ''I was making pitches with it.''

That leaves Peavy questionable for Game 4 on Sunday, if the series goes that long. The Padres must rely on two uninspiring starters for that to happen: Pedro Astacio (6-10 over all, 4-2 with San Diego) and Woody Williams (9-12), who pitched for the Cardinals the previous three-plus seasons. Peavy vowed to pitch with pain if he could; the rib will take four to six weeks to heal. ''Don't count me out just yet,'' he said.

On this day, anyway, the Cardinals appeared unbeatable. The Cy Young Award candidate Chris Carpenter, after four subpar outings to close the season, held the Padres to three hits over six scoreless innings. The Cardinals turned three double plays behind Carpenter before he left with numbness in the fingers of both hands. The Cardinals' medical staff attributed it to dehydration; the temperature was 84 degrees when the game began at 12:10 p.m. Central time.

''Carpenter did an amazing job,'' Sanders said. ''We all knew he had had a couple of bad outings. But there was no doubt in my mind he would be the Carpenter we knew and we had seen all year.''

Sanders and Jim Edmonds, two-thirds of the Cardinals' banged-up outfield, combined for five hits and seven R.B.I. ''We had a W.W.F. outfield, I guess,'' said Walker, the right fielder who has had four cortisone shots for a herniated disk in his neck.

Edmonds played one inning in the Cardinals' final three regular-season games after spraining his right shoulder diving for a ball last Wednesday. But in his first at-bat in six days, he drove Peavy's fourth pitch into the San Diego bullpen in left.

Sanders had been the hottest-hitting Cardinal the final week of the season, homering three times in the last four games and finishing the season with a six-game R.B.I. streak. After Peavy's wild pitch in the third, Sanders's two-run single off first baseman Mark Sweeney's glove in the third made the score 4-0. The slam in the fifth featured Sanders beginning his home-run trot with a Sammy Sosa-like hop, which delighted the red-shirted, towel-waving crowd of 52,349.

In a frenzied finish, the Padres scored three runs in the ninth on six hits and had the potential winning run, Ramon Hernandez, at the plate with the bases loaded and two out. But Cardinals closer Jason Isringhausen struck him out swinging.

That did not make Peavy feel any better, especially after his M.R.I. result came back.

''I was sick,'' he said. ''I knew what that meant.''

Photos: After Padres starter Jake Peavy took the loss, he found out he pitched with a fractured rib. (Photo by Charlie Neibergall/Associated Press); Jim Edmonds hitting a bases-empty home run in the first inning. The Cardinals led, 8-0, by the fifth. (Photo by Scott Rovak/European Pressphoto Agency)